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The 'War on Bad Weather'

By Luke Escombe - posted Monday, 5 March 2007


In each case, the strategy was the same: demonise a particular group, develop a series of specific linguistic terms (essentially inventing a new language) in order to influence people's thoughts, show some strong visual images that support your thesis, thus penetrating public imagination, then repeat, repeat, repeat, until it becomes "the truth".

If you scan through our familiar literature for a similar model you'll find a perfect example of this sort of tactic being employed. It's the story of The Boy who cried Wolf. The problem there, as with here, is that eventually the wolf actually does arrive and slaughter both the boy and the sheep. For the naturally cautious among us (i.e. most of the population), this presents a dilemma. When are we to know whether the threat is real or invented? If there's even the slightest possibility that the boy might be telling the truth, shouldn't we run up the hill armed with our sticks and torches just in case? I suppose so. But we must also ask ourselves this: how many times are we going to let the lying little bastard get away with it before we give his job to someone more responsible?

Enter Al Gore, the "loser" of the pivotal millennium US election, with a (now Oscar-winning) film called An Inconvenient Truth. Before this film, climate change was a fringe issue, still mostly the domain of greens and lefties, real back-of-the-shelf stuff. Now it has more or less displaced terrorism as the Western world's number one fear. Bolstered by images of Hurricane Katrina and the Asian Tsunami, it has ceased to be a vague threat and become a clear and present danger to our lives. An "inconvenient" truth? Hardly. It's exactly what those longing to topple the Bush regime have been waiting for. A "truth"? Well, does it really matter?

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What's brilliant about the climate change narrative - for the sake of simplicity let's call it "the War on Bad Weather" - from the Democrat point of view, is that it directly threatens both of the neo-conservative's key areas of support. For starters, it fuels public demand for alternative energy sources, which is very bad news if you happen to get your biggest pay cheques from oil companies. It also threatens to divide their strong Christian fanbase along the following line of argument: "If God is responsible for the weather, then what on earth is making him so angry?"

The far-right Christians may be happy to believe that God's wrath is a way of telling us to kill more Muslims. More moderate Christians, however, may be quite easily swayed by arguments that irresponsible industrial practices, spurred on by corporate greed, have played a part. Then there are the even groovier followers of Christ, who may be readily convinced, if they aren't already, that this illegal and disastrous war their government has waged in God's name is the number one thing that's pissing the big guy off.

Whatever the case, the right will have a tough time defending itself on the climate change issue. Either it ignores it completely and makes a dramatic attempt to hold power by trying to pick a fight with another Middle Eastern country a few weeks before the election, or it seeks to discredit it.

The real problem is that there's no way they can keep the issue out of people's minds and under any sort of control. Everybody in the Western world talks about the weather all the time. We don't need sophisticated media propaganda to tell us it's getting hotter. Whereas convincing people to be afraid of terrorists requires constant invention, an ever-developing narrative of hidden cells and a large cast of invisible enemies with sinister accents and beards, climate change just requires them to go outside and look up at the sky.

It's a far superior fiction, because it's much easier to sustain. If you feel your party is losing because your electorate is more interested in the weather than politics, then just make talking about the weather a political action. It's a narrative masterstroke by the opponents of the far-right.

Best of all, for them, is the fact that volcanoes, hurricanes and tsunamis happen around the world all the time. History has proven it. If those things are your enemy then you are guaranteed of having visual proof of enemy activities more or less whenever you want it. If you have to wait for terrorists to blow something up, on the other hand, you could be waiting forever.

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Stories of police foiling a "massive terrorist plot" involving planes, bridges, nukes, poison gas and or dirty bombs just don't have the same appeal. The strength of the fiction depends on its ability to deliver plausible action set pieces. Without the explosion, it's just a political thriller. The audience for these sorts of films is much smaller, and they're the wrong sort of people. They think too much.

This is not to say that the Democrats won't contrive to mess it all up again in the months leading up to the election, but you feel it would take a master piece of story-telling to steal public attention away from the new fiction set into motion by Gore's movie. It will certainly take more than the collective imaginations of Tom Clancy, Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer to save the Republicans this time. Staging an alien invasion might do it, but how would they keep all the extras quiet? Besides, every time we go to look at the skies we'll just be reminded of how crazy the weather is.

As to whether An Inconvenient Truth is actually "true" or not, that's an entirely separate issue.

I'm in no position to judge and neither are most of you. The fact that it puts pressure on unpopular entities such as Big Oil makes a lot of us feel good about believing it. The fact that there's no obvious reason why adopting a more environmentally conscious approach would lead to mass slaughter is another plus. Recycling might be a lot less exciting than separating the members of your community into friends and terrorists, but it's also a lot easier to do. As to how effective this activity is in combating the threat of global warming: again, that's another debate. For now, it's a welcome shift in our collective story. Bush and his circle of pulp novelists have been out-narrated and must slink into the shadows like Gollum.

If there's one consolation for the far-right though, it's that people's memories are not much longer than their attention spans. In ten years time, when Arnold Schwarzenegger strides out on to the White House lawn, you can bet he'll have them charging up the hill again looking for that elusive wolf. Asians, Hispanics, atheists and intellectuals beware: next time, it could be you!

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About the Author

Luke Escombe is a musician, songwriter and writer. He blogs here.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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